Historians on Drugs: Toward an Empirical Historiography of Global Psychedelic Cultures Free

Mention of San Francisco's psychedelic landscape brings to mind Golden Gate Park, the ajna chakra of the Haight-Ashbury and home to the Human Be-In/Gathering of the Tribes that inaugurated the Summer of Love in 1967. Now the “Hashbury” is mostly tourist traps, a Disneyfied simulacrum of its former self. Yet, San Francisco remains a psychedelic cityscape. Today, the action has shifted further inland and south to Dolores Park, a small hilly green that, on any given day, hosts a higher concentration of people getting stoned than anywhere else in the city. As a scholar of post-sixties psychedelic scenes, I find it the ideal place to track the tectonic shifts in the cultures of mind expansion.

On a recent trip, I watched as the familiar cannabis dealers made their way across a sea of picnic blankets, vending pre-rolled joints and infused edibles at about a third of the price offered by the dispensaries just a few blocks away. Today, though, my eyes were tracking a relatively new character in the park's street-level psychedelic scene. Since San Francisco decriminalized plant-based psychedelics in 2022, magic mushroom dealers have started to appear in Dolores, often carrying homemade cardboard signs painted to resemble the iconic fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) mushroom, the red-capped fungi with white flecks. As I scanned for mushroom placards, I recalled Timothy Leary's idea of a new spiritual archetype in the American religious landscape, the “righteous dealer.” Unlike the narcotrafficker, motivated by money, the righteous dealer was animated by a spiritual mission to illuminate the world by sharing the “sacraments” of consciousness expansion. For them dealing is not a business transaction but a religious calling bound by a higher code of ethics that reflects a dawning new age of love, joy, and expanded consciousness (Yablonsky 1968: 29–33; Leary 1978). I did not have to wait long before I spotted a DIY mushroom sign on the other side of the park, and having made my way over, I soon found myself deep in conversation.

My interlocuter explained that his magic mushrooms were free for a moderate donation to his psychedelic fellowship, the Church of Consciousness. Curious, I inquired about the beliefs and rituals of his organization, only to hear that he was the only member of his “church,” which was not a brick-and-mortar storefront but the name he gave to his cultivation and distribution of psilocybin. “Why call it a church?” I asked. “The mushrooms provide a sacred experience,” he replied, before describing how a major mushroom trip pushed him to kick an opioid addiction, which in turn led him to sharing the gospel of psychedelics to all San Franciscans. “So, you are a missionary for the mushroom?” I inquired. “No, the mushrooms are simply a means for opening up cosmic consciousness. It is the experience of god that matters most.” I had encountered this idea before and knew the proper response: “It just so happens that psilocybin [the active compound in magic mushrooms] offers the most expedient means of occasioning that experience.” His response: “Exactly.” While he didn't have any literature, he was kind enough to gift me one of the church's stickers.

Not long after returning to my picnic blanket, I spotted another man festooned with fly agaric jewelry and a similar placard. After collecting a sticker from his church, the Sacred Sacraments Ministry, he explained that mushrooms were not “drugs” but humanity's oldest religious technology, going all the way back to shamanism in the stone age. This idea is a staple of modern psychedelic folklore, and recognizing a fellow traveler, he was eager to share his other beliefs, starting with the fact that Jesus was actually not a human being but a mushroom. Same with the Buddha.

Instead of challenging his rap about how every religion was ultimately rooted in psychedelic shamanism, I considered how the values of this invented tradition inverted the social norms inculcated by the war on drugs. In short, the psychedelic theory of religion conferred a level of prestige to mushroom missionaries, who tend to be regarded as criminals and dropouts. His ideas brought to mind the students that enroll in my summer seminar, “The Psychedelic Universe,” which examines humanity's use of mind-expanding drugs from prehistory to present. Like my students, the mushroom missionaries of Dolores Park have seen through the drug war propaganda that unjustifiably vilified psychedelics as dangerous “narcotics.” However, their insistence that psychedelics are the engine of history is an unfortunate overcompensation in the face of drug war propaganda. Neither the drug war imperative to write drugs off nor the reactionary impulse to overemphasize their significance offers a productive basis for scholarship. Indeed, these reductionist approaches obscure the basic fact that the psychedelic experience is not sui generis. There is no such thing as the psychedelic experience, only psychedelic experiences that are always already inscribed with contextual meanings and values. Therefore, a fuller understanding of psychedelic experiences requires scholars and scientists to recover the multiplicity of meanings associated with powerful psychotropic drugs across time and space. In sum, the global history of psychedelic consciousness demands a nuanced mode of historicism that relies on an empirical, or “bottom-up,” approach. This article aims to meet that demand.

The use of psychoactive drugs is found across cultures and can be traced to humanity's ancient past (Hofmann, Schultes, and Rätsch 2001). Evidence for this interconnection is especially discernible in the global history of religion. The most famous connection is perhaps the Indo-Aryan hymns to “soma” of the Rg Veda (ca. 1500–700 BCE), the oldest scripture of any extant religious tradition, though the actual identity of this substance continues to confound scholars after more than a century of intensive study. The Bronze (2000 to 700 BCE) and Iron Ages (1200 and 600 BCE), however, are rich in verifiable drug ceremonialism, from the ritual vaporization of cannabis in Jewish temple sites in the Levant, to the henbane-spiked viticulture of classical cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, and the veneration of the San Pedro cactus within the Chavín civilization in the Peruvian highlands. This imbrication of mind-expanding drugs and religion continued into the immense pharmacopeia of Mexica civilization, which ruled over a large section of Central America before the arrival of Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century. This interlacing is no less evident in the present day, as represented in the astonishingly complex archive of psychedelic plants, snuffs, venoms, and herbs used in concert with ceremonies of initiation within tribal societies, especially on what Neil Carrier (2022) termed “the forgotten drug continent,” Africa. Concurrently, there is the Native American Church's sacramental uses of peyote, the veneration of ayahuasca by Santo Daime (not to mention the rise of ayahuasca neo-shamanism on a global scale), and the movement of acid churches that developed out of the sixties’ flower power movement, and their descendants currently roaming Dolores Park.

While today's reading public may know little of the long history of psychedelics, it is certainly aware of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, a resurgence of clinical trials focused on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, alcohol dependency, and tobacco addiction with psychedelic drugs. The publication of Roland Griffith and colleagues’ (2006) groundbreaking article, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” established the interrelationship between psychedelic-induced mystical experiences and positive mental health outcomes. After repeated demonstrations of the transdiagnostic efficacy of psilocybin, additional psychedelics have reentered the clinical setting, including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The burgeoning science of psychedelic mysticism has, perhaps unsurprisingly, inspired psychopharmacologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists to stake claims within territories previously reserved for historians of religion, like the origins of otherworldly visions, the nature of revelations, and the reality of ethereal beings. With little direct input from scholars of religion, however, the medicalization of these topics has perpetuated problematic generalizations about the nature of spiritual experience. Moreover, these generalizations have been broadcast to the American public at large, as in Michael Pollan's best-selling book (and later Netflix documentary) How to Change Your Mind (2018). The reduction of “mysticism” to a singularly positive experience of cosmic unity is among the most deleterious generalizations within the medical literature. The same goes for the idealization of psychedelics as mental health panaceas. These inaccuracies will be discussed later. For the moment, though, it is sufficient to flag how the so-called psychedelic renaissance is not simply the “rebirth” of scientific research; it also represents a reformation of the drug war, insofar as it rests on the self-congratulatory presumption that the preceding six decades of psychedelic history were a “Dark Ages” of madness, irrationality, and stupidity.

Clinical studies demonstrating the physiological correlation between psychedelic experience and neurogenetic brain change transformed the discourse of consciousness expansion from tired hippie clichés to cutting-edge science. This transformation inspired a minority of scholars in the humanities to pose direct challenges to decades of academic orthodoxy that ignored the role of psychoactives in the human story. Following the pioneering work of Peter Furst and Weston La Barre, the cognitive archaeologist Tom Froese has hypothesized that the religious imagination itself was the direct result of humanity's discovery of psychoactive substances in the Neolithic period (10,000–4500 BCE) (Froese, Guzmán, and Dávalos 2016). Further speculations by ethno-archaeologists Greg Wadley and Brian Hayden (2015) push the argument back to the Upper Paleolithic (circa 40,000 BCE), arguing that Homo sapiens's experimentation with the psilocybin-containing mushrooms sparked the “cognitive revolution” in abstract thinking and symbiotic culture. Going even further, indeed millions of years earlier, others have argued that hominid populations increased their evolutionary adaptability by ingesting psilocybin-containing mushrooms, a thesis initially proposed by the psychedelic or “head” philosopher Terence McKenna (1993; see also Guerra-Doce 2015; Arce and Winkelman 2021). Our inability to ever conclusively verify these theses raises the question of stakes. In other words: Who cares if our ancient ancestors got high?

Discussions concerning the role of psychedelics in religious life, approached from whichever field of research, inspires fierce debate. Arguments that ascribe the religious revelations of saints, prophets, and miracle workers to the use of psychedelics have proved simply repugnant to many academics for the last sixty-five years. Such prejudicial attitudes reflect larger social forces, principally the “war on drugs” (1971–present), which created little incentive for scholars to challenge the cultural stigma surrounding the meanings and uses of psychedelics such as mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, and DMT, among many others. The professional dangers facing researchers who take the role of psychedelics in history seriously are all too real, because, as scholar Wouter Hanegraaff (2012: 395) noted, “it is always easy for critics to suggest that their scholarly arguments are just a front for some personal agendas of pro-psychedelic apologetics.”

Scholarship focused on the global history of psychedelics is divided into two rival approaches. This article analyzes these approaches, emphasizing the way in which ideological biases on both sides have stymied serious research into the diverse communities, practices, and beliefs informed by powerful psychotropics. The discussion opens by analyzing the most prevalent view, “pharmacological Calvinism,” which essentializes mind-altering drugs, alongside their users, as variously primitive, degenerate, or antisocial. Pharmacological Calvinism most readily expressed itself as a wall of silence. Psychedelics were simply unworthy of serious discussion for historians, anthropologists, and scientists of religion alike during the war on drugs, and this reductive approach has defined the intellectual mainstream across academic disciplines up through the present.

In contrast to pharmacological Calvinism, the entheogenic school offers a maximalist interpretation of psychedelics’ impact on human culture and cognition. Interdisciplinary at its core, this revisionist school is grounded in the work of Gordon Wasson, the public relations executive at J. P. Morgan bank turned amateur ethnomycologist, whose thesis linked the origins of religion to the use of fly agaric mushroom among Neolithic shamans. Across dozens of books and articles, the founders of this school and their admirers explained how the ceremonial use of fly agaric mushroom represents the Ur-religion of humanity, animating Indigenous belief systems, as well as the earliest expressions of Hinduism, Greek and Roman paganism, paleo-Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism. The defining feature of this school is the certainty that psychedelic drugs communicate the universal truth at the core of all religious and spiritual traditions. They borrowed this perennialist conceit from Aldous Huxley, author of The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and, more importantly, The Doors of Perception (1954), which introduced psychedelics to the American public. The belief that psychedelics provide direct access to the sacred is encoded into the entheogenic school's preferred term of art for mind-expanding drugs, entheogen, a neologism meaning “generating god within.” The term was coined as a substitute for the more familiar term psychedelic as a means of differentiating the sacred use of drugs across human cultures from what they perceived as the hedonistic adventurism of modern subcultural networks.

My examination of the two major perspectives on psychedelic historiography is a means of introducing a new framework, here termed the “empirical” approach. To be clear, this paradigm is in fact more of a desideratum than a reality and is defined by comparatively granular research that draws from a deep understanding of primary sources placed in conversation with the intellectual apparatuses of the secondary literature. Distinctly uninterested in unveiling psychedelics as the “key” to any tradition, or the “secret” behind familiar religious motifs, this approach does not regard the alterations of consciousness generated by psychedelics as exceptional in the longue durée of human culture. Rather, it places psychedelics on equal footing with other techniques for brain change, such as sensory deprivation, fasting, and self-flagellation. This anti-reductionist perspective tends to see the effects of drugs as, predominantly, socially constructed, instead of reducing them to an authentic sacrament (as in the case of the entheogenicists) or dangerous narcotics (pharmacological Calvinists). More specifically, it rejects what Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (1997) termed “pharmacological determinism,” which is the widespread view that each drug possesses its own uniquely innate and immutable power, ignoring how psychedelic experiences are shaped by social factors and cultural variables (Dupuis 2022). In other words, representatives from the empiricist perspective do not extrapolate context-specific evidence concerning the religious use of psychedelics into large-scale revisionist projects, as in the case with the entheogenic approach. Rather, this approach interprets the multiplicity of meanings and values associated with powerful psychotropics, alongside other modes of ecstasy and transpersonal relationality, as an integral dimension of the human story.

This article concludes by turning to the real-world stakes of utilizing the empirical approach. The public outcry and professional censure of, for example, John M. Allegro's Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) demonstrates how pharmacological Calvinism entails more than a conservative attitude about mind-altering drugs. It shapes what can and cannot be said about the significance of psychedelic drugs. More seriously, the perennialist framework of the entheogenicists has been subsumed into the scientific research of the psychedelic renaissance, which is now promulgating a crypto-theology of “mystical experience” under the guise of scientific objectivity. As will become clear, empirical scholarship offers a means of reestablishing the foundations of the science of psychedelic therapy, which in turn can inform new explorations into humanity's irresistible impulse to expand consciousness.

Pharmacological Calvinism

Each year, tens of thousands of religious studies scholars congregate for the American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference. Five years ago, I collaborated with Emory University professor Gary Laderman in petitioning the ruling body for the creation of a “Drugs and Religion” unit, given the fact that drugs had become a minor but recurrent theme across the conference's many thematic units. In their initial rejection of our proposal, the AAR pushed back on the idea that drugs had much to do with religion beyond clear-cut cases such as the use of peyote in Native American churches. As a result, our second and third petitions offered more capacious descriptions of our topic, citing the spiritual meanings projected onto psychedelics, in addition to alcohol, caffeine, and pharmaceuticals in premodern, modern, and postmodern life. When that failed, Gary and I tried a different tactic. We invited the most recognizable psychedelic artists working today, Alex and Allison Grey, for a roundtable discussion. The audience overflowed into the hallway. Though this was sufficient to persuade the board to grant our petition, the belief that drugs are anathema to, or separate from, authentic religious experience persists among scholars of religion. The name of this prejudicial view is pharmacological Calvinism.

The term pharmacological Calvinism was coined in 1972 by Gerald L. Klerman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, to describe the distrust of drugs hardwired into the American value system (Klerman 1972). He summarized this view cogently: “Abstinence is the highest ideal” (3). The author evoked Calvinism to imply that Americans’ suspicious attitude toward drugs is akin to what Max Weber termed the Protestant work ethic, the view that salvation had to be earned with hard work and could not be purchased as an indulgence, contrary to Catholicism (Langlitz 2012: 34–35). While Klerman was addressing his colleagues in medicine, the concept maps perfectly onto the way psychedelics have been treated in the study of religion. It would be a mistake to regard pharmacological Calvinism as a single point of view; rather, it encompasses a variety of strategies for the delegitimization of psychedelics as a source of meaning and values. Three major trends define this perspective.

The earliest and most substantial critique of psychedelics and their connection to religious experience appeared as a trio of erudite volumes, Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism (1973), Our Savage God (1974), and City within the Heart (1981), all by the Oxford don R. C. Zaehner. Each refuted the claim that psychedelics generate mystical experiences, as publicized in The Doors of Perception and amplified throughout the media sphere by major psychedelic theorists such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, John Sinclair, and Ken Kesey, whose ideas energized the psychedelic networks that emerged across the United States throughout the sixties and seventies (Partridge 2018b; Davis 2019). Zaehner's brand of pharmacological Calvinism was colored by his own, Roman Catholic view that authentic mystical experience could not be generated on demand by brain-changing drugs, but only granted spontaneously according to divine grace. Analogous to a manic-depressive state, what the acidheads got was an altogether inferior dissolution of the self, which posed a direct threat to society's social order. As Zaehner (1974: 9) elaborated in his analysis of Charles Manson, when psychedelics are undertaken en masse, this “profane” form of enlightenment places the user beyond considerations of good and evil, instead engendering a “diabolic insensitivity” toward human suffering.

A secularized analog of Zaehner's approach was propagated by Mircea Eliade, arguably the twentieth century's most influential scholar of religion (Sedgwick 2004: 190; Wasserstrom 1999: 3). As his voluminous output led the way in distinguishing the history of religion as an autonomous field, and not a subdiscipline of theology or sociology, Eliade's “Calvinist” attitude toward drugs carried enormous weight. He left little ambiguity about drugs in his foundational study of archaic religion, Shamanism ([1951] 1972: 222, 401), which categorically marginalized the use of drugs among humanity's oldest religious specialists as a later, “decadent” development and clear sign of spiritual degeneration. Extending far beyond the scholarly discourse on archaic religion, the oversized impact of his claim is linked to the fact that religious studies as a field modeled itself after Eliade's mythocentric theory of religion (Sedgwick 2004: 112–13). Within this framework, the shaman represented the paragon of authentic religiosity, standing outside of history as the universal source from whence the myths and symbols underlying myriad religious traditions were derived. If drugs were degenerate behavior for humanity's oldest religious technicians, they were hardly anything better for subsequent religious communities, and therefore unworthy of attention.

Zaehner's strain of pharmacological Calvinism spoke to the theologically inclined scholars of religion, whereas Eliade's archetypal approach delegitimated psychedelics for secular-minded comparativists in the field. Though different, their disavowals were made on general grounds, discounting drugs as irrelevant to religion across space and time. Other scholars took an alternative, though complementary tact by marginalizing drugs in context-specific domains. The textbook example of this particularist approach is Walter Burkert's foundational Ancient Mystery Cults (1989). Burkert's misapprehension about the effects of psychedelic substances delegitimized the study of drugs as key elements in the religions of Greco-Roman antiquity for an entire generation of scholars (Hanegraaff 2022: 44n89). To quote Burkert (1989: 108) directly, “The easy way to uncommon experience is through the use of drugs . . . in fact, there are many who will never be persuaded that there could have been mysteries without drugs.” Without citing any evidence, he went on to declare, “What is perhaps more important is that the use of drugs, as our time has been doomed to see, does not create a true sense of community but rather leads to isolation” (109). The monumental status of Burkert's work in the comparative study of Greco-Roman religion normalized his prejudicial view of psychedelics among scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity.

The long-standing neglect of psychedelics within serious scholarship set the stage for serious misapprehension on the conceptual level. Among the most significant is “counterculture” popularized in Theodore Roszak's Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969). Roszak deployed the term as a means of obscuring the importance of psychedelics in the minor religious awakening of the sixties. Subsequent to the book's publication and successive reprintings, Roszak enshrined the concept of the counterculture in both public and academic discussion of modern acid culture. The commonplace usage of the term today belies the fact that the author exhumed this formerly obscure piece of jargon from the depths of sociological theory to deflect attention away from the central role occupied by psychedelics within the hip culture of postwar America. Clearly not the work of a disinterested scholar, The Making of a Counter Culture is a fiery manifesto for the cultural revolt that erupted in late 1960s America. For its author, humanity had reached a deadly turning point in its history with the advent of the nuclear bomb, and so he offered readers a stark choice: humanity had to either abandon industrial civilization or succumb to global atomic annihilation. The book distinguished itself among other liberal, antinuclear commentaries of the era because it did not champion the antiwar politics of the New Left, Black Power, or even women's liberation as leading humanity beyond the nuclear impasse. The future of civilization rested in what Roszak termed the counterculture of the “Beat-bohemians” on the “hip fringe” of society whose Romantic radicalism represented the only substantial challenge to ruling technocracy (Partridge 2018a: 3–15). For all his unrestrained sympathy for the hip insurgents, this Berkeley professor detested psychedelic culture and the “occult narcissism” of psychedelic spirituality (Roszak 1969: 64).

The author's paternalistic approach to the counterculture reached a feverish climax in a chapter-long repudiation of the psychedelic movement, tellingly titled “The Counterfeit Infinity.” This extended defamation of psychedelics likened the hip youth's experimentation with mind-expanding drugs to sniffing airplane glue, and it attacked Leary, the high priest of LSD, as an opportunistic charlatan who concocted his religious approach to drug taking as a bad-faith legal dodge. To be sure, Roszak was not interested in describing the religio-cultural revolt of the flower children as it was; rather, his book described what he felt the revolution should be, and the term counterculture served as the emblem for the salvific movement he envisioned, over and against the realities of acid culture. Needless to say, the subsequent popularity of this term has had a detrimental effect on the empirical study of psychedelic networks. As Peter Braunstein and Michael Doyle (2001: 5) argued, what value can the ideological construct of the counterculture have if it encompasses “all 1960s-era political, social, or cultural dissent, encompassing any action from smoking pot at a rock concert to offing a cop?”

The so-called counterculture is a euphemism for the rapidly developing subcultural scenes born out of the era of mass psychedelic experimentation. To be sure, this spiritual efflorescence took shape across institutional forms, beginning with the movement of psychedelics fellowships and churches, including Kerista, the League of Spiritual Discovery, the Merry Pranksters, Discordiansism, the Moorish Orthodox Church of America, Zenta, the Psychedelic Venus Society, and True Light Beavers (Marinacci 2023; Greer 2022a, 2022b, 2023). Psychedelic people also organized themselves into militant political cadres (e.g., the White Panther Party, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, and the Yippies/Zippies), urban and rural communes (The Farm, cofounded by Stephen Gaskin), LGBTQ collectives (Cockettes and Radical Faeries), criminal syndicates (Brotherhood of Eternal Love), eco-activists (Greenpeace), recurring festivals and raves (Burning Man), and alternative therapy centers (Esalen). While united in the belief that psychedelics open up higher dimensions of awareness, each of these groups cultivated its own worldview, rituals, and practices. Therefore, to restate my argument, the concept of counterculture plays into the pharmacological Calvinist agenda by deflecting attention away from psychedelic networks, further marginalizing their role in shaping the religio-cultural history of the United States over the last sixty-five years. As an artifact of the drug war, counterculture offers little explanatory power for scholars today for the very plain reason that it lacks historical specificity (has there been only one counterculture or many?), casts psychedelic networks as purely oppositional, and, most significantly, homogenizes a heterogeneous mix of communities into a single grouping.

The conceptual inadequacies of the counterculture offer a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the analytic superiority of the empirical perspective. As the historical archive makes clear, psychedelic networks formed among diverse populations, cutting across race, gender, and class boundaries. As a means of emphasizing that these networks belong to a collective movement, despite generating their own distinct practices, doctrines, rituals, and values, I coined the term psychedelicism. As I have explained elsewhere, just as Buddhism encompasses a multitude of scriptures, institutional and noninstitutional orders, sectarian divisions, and lay communities, the same is true of psychedelicism, which is formed from an amalgamation of the networked collectives mentioned above. The concept of psychedelicism also redirects attention away from unhelpful, yet commonplace stereotypes such as the term hippie, which is racially coded as straight, white, middle-class adolescents. The use of this term flattens the diversification of psychedelic networks over the last half century. Scholars looking to account for the psychedelicist culture of the “hippies” after 1969 would be confronted with something of a dead end; however, centering analysis in the concept of psychedelicists, a term that is race and gender neutral, broadens the scope of analysis to include, for example, the working-class Black men and women of the Funkadelic movement who reinvented acid culture throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Clinton and Greenman 2017).

Two additional points bear mentioning. The concept of the counterculture presupposes that psychedelicist movements are based, fundamentally, on negation or opposition. Conversely, by working from the bottom up, psychedelicism underscores the experimentalist nature of these scenes, drawing attention to the role of innovation and novelty even among activist psychedelicist groups. Finally, this approach historicizes the philosophical basis of psychedelicist ideation. The psychedelic claim that a certain class of drugs has the power to “expand” consciousness is by no means an objective scientific truth. Rather, this claim on the nature of consciousness, and its capacity to expand with the use of drugs, entails an enchanted theory of naturalism formulated in The Doors of Perception (1954). Huxley's groundbreaking philosophy of drug-induced gnosis conditioned the way psychedelics were discussed, used, and even the outcomes they produced up through the present. Indeed, my students routinely remark how boring they find this book, a telling commentary on the way Huxley's psychedelicist theorizing has become common knowledge. Here it is instructive to return to the comparison between psychedelicism and Buddhism. Instead of venerating a shared founder, like the Buddha, psychedelict networks are held together by the enchanted theory of naturalism Huxley presented in The Doors of Perception. This enchanted naturalism is centered on the fundamental nature of consciousness and its innate, but currently untapped, potential to “expand” into new, godlike dimensions. By extension, the concept of psychedelicism underscores how there are many alternative systems of meanings and values projected onto powerful psychoactives. For example, ayahuasca use in precolonial Peru or hashish use among medieval Sufis do not fall under the auspices of this psychedelicism, as psychedelicism is a modern Western interpretation of what happens when the body metabolizes these drugs.

Having laid out the parameters of the psychedelicism framework, attention can return to the shortcomings of the pharmacological Calvinist perspective. While Zaehner, Eliade, Burkert, and Roszak employed different strategies for delegitimizing psychedelics, their work nonetheless rested on three foundational claims. This reductionist view begins with (1) an a priori suspicion toward the use of any recreational drugs and the concomitant pharmacologically deterministic belief that such use (2) generates antisocial attitudes and delusions that (3) bear no resemblance to authentic religious revelations. This perspective owes more to popular misconceptions perpetuated by the war on drugs, which associates normative drug use with criminality, addiction, and subaltern communities (e.g., youth, migrants, the poor, and BIPOC), than their scientific classification, ethnobotanical histories, chemical profiles, or psychopharmacology. Accordingly, this line of research rarely distinguishes between classes of psychoactives (stimulant, opiate, psychedelic), instead using the unsystematic term narcotics as a catchall (Carneiro 2022: 61). For these scholars, a more accurate term for psychedelic drugs is psychotomimetic (literally psychosis-mimicking), a concept coined in the mid-1950s by psychiatrists who believed that substances like mescaline and LSD induced a delusional state of mind analogous to schizophrenia (Dyck 2008: 32–52). The term hallucinogen is also related to this view, as it likewise pathologizes the alteration of consciousness.

Entheogenic School

A reaction to the dismissive attitude of pharmacological Calvinism, the entheogenic school sought to foreground the vital role of psychedelics in the human story. This approach was partially catalyzed by the professional reprisal suffered by a leading entheogenic scholar, Carl Ruck, following the publication of The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (1978), coauthored with Wasson and Albert Hofmann. With its bold conclusion that a psychedelic sacrament lay at the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries, this anthology remains the most widely read contribution this school has made to research on psychedelics. Yet the dean of Boston University, John Silber, famously repudiated the book as dangerous pro-drug propaganda, removed Ruck as chair of the classics department, disbanded his graduate seminars, and stripped him of PhD students (Muraresku 2020: 46–47). Such an egregious transgression of academic freedom proved to Ruck and his collaborators that they had struck on a dangerous idea—indeed, an idea so dangerous it had the power to transform the world. This shared sense of pursuing a world-historical idea is one of the most salient features of this school.

The entheogenic school of psychedelic historiography has produced a considerable body of work that has simultaneously alienated scholars and stimulated public interest in the relationship between psychedelic drugs and religion. This school can be further divided into a core group of researchers, including Wasson, Ruck, Hofmann, Jonathan Ott, and Clark Heinrich, who present the “hard” formulation of the entheogenic thesis, which promulgates the sacramental use of psychedelics as the engine behind the birth of humanity's religious imagination and the original, animating force behind the world's religious, spiritual, and esoteric traditions. Their work is complemented by “soft” entheogenic hypotheses, which reveal the use of psychedelics in specific religious traditions, regional folklore, and national myths. While hard and soft entheogenic scholars do not always agree on details they are bound together as a school in their pharmacologically determined view that psychedelics are gateways to the perennial truth unfolding across the religious traditions of humankind. A dramatic overcorrection from the pharmacological Calvinist strain of thought, entheogenic research entails a search for evidence to validate a foregone conclusion; as a result, evidence to the contrary is often ignored or downplayed. Instead of engaging the secondary literature dedicated to their research topics, entheogenic authors cite texts by other members of their school as undisputed fact. Considering these factors, it represents the only proper “school” of thought, compared to the other approaches examined in this article, which are more akin to general viewpoints.

When stitched together, entheogenic scholarship forms a revisionist world history, beginning with the prehistorical systems of drug shamanism that the Indo-Aryans synthesized into the first religion of humankind. Spreading across the ancient Indian subcontinent, the Indo-Aryans’ fly agaric rituals inspired one of humanity's oldest religious scripture, the Rg Vedas, from whence this primordial cult of ecstasy continued to spread across the globe, moving into the Levant to inspire the Israelites’ account of a “tree of the knowledge” as recalled in the book of Genesis, and into Persia, where the so-called religion with no name gave rise to the haoma complex in the Zoroastrian Avesta (Wasson et al. 1986; Merkur 2000; Dannaway 2009; Ruck 2006). Moving westward, it informed the rise of Greek culture as the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries, thereby inspiring Greek philosophy, myth, and eventually producing the eucharist of the paleo-Christian church (Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck [1978] 2008; Ruck, Hoffman, and González Celdrán 2011; Ruck, Staples, and Heinrich 2001; Brown and Brown 2016; Muraresku 2020). Furthermore, this maximalist view concerning the impact of psychedelic drugs on human culture is not limited to the origins of religion, as entheogenic authors also argue that ancient mythology, folklore, fairy tales, the grail legend, cryptozoological creatures, megalithic structures like Stonehenge, and even Santa Claus are all cyphers for ancient drug lore (Devereux 1997; Heinrich 2002; Ruck et al. 2007; Newman 2017).

The driving force behind this school is Wasson, now recognized as a pioneer of ethnomycology. Wasson's Life Magazine photo essay, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” (1957), inflamed public interest in psychoactive drugs, specifically psilocybe mushrooms, as well as their ceremonial use among curanderos, or Mexican folk healers (Znamenski 2007: 123–31). The article was a prelude to Wasson's first monograph, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968), which proposed a novel solution to a mystery that had long puzzled Indologists: What was soma? Numerous answers had been suggested, but none represented a precise fit for the tripartite plant, god, and “drug of immortality” that preoccupied the Indo-Aryans. Wasson suggested Amanita muscaria, and his thesis had much to recommend it with respect to linguistic, ethnobotanical, and pharmacological evidence. Nonetheless, his book was summarily dismissed from serious consideration, first in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies and again in the first issue of Indologica Taurinensia, both featuring in-depth refutations by John Brough of Cambridge University, whose prestige was sufficient to persuade Indologists and Sanskritologists to follow suit in repudiating Wasson's thesis (Brough 1973; Smith 1972; Clark 2017: 123–24). This would not be the last word in the conversation, though.

The scholarly bias against Wasson's soma thesis also inflamed the ethnomycologist to dig deeper into the “entheogenic” roots of human civilization in his follow-up book, The Road to Eleusis. Here Wasson attempted to remove any doubt about the centrality of mind-altering drugs in the Eleusinian Mysteries. To be sure, the text was not a dispassionate evaluation of the evidence, but an ideologically driven (and interdisciplinary) assault on received wisdom concerning Greek mystery religions (Ruck 2008: 12, 14; Clark 2017: 123n393). The book included the work of Ruck, who explained how Greek wine was often fortified with powerful psychoactive plants and herbs; Hofmann, who demonstrated how ergotized wheat could have been the active ingredient in the LSD-like sacrament allegedly utilized by the hierophants at Eleusis; and Wasson, who traced the tradition of entheogenic ceremonialism from the Eleusinian Mysteries to the healing traditions of Mexican curanderos. The general lack of scholarly interest in this work can be contrasted with its popularity among amateur ethnobotanists, psychedelic intellectuals (“heads”), and the larger cultural underground that embraced the book as a modern masterpiece. Republished numerous times in the subsequent years, its formulation of the entheogenic thesis inspired shelves of “soft” entheogenic books that often lack its interdisciplinary rigor.

Today the entheogenic school is led by roughly a dozen independent scholars who employ creative etymological wrangling and an idiosyncratic interpretation of color, myths, and symbolism as the master key for unlocking the secret history of religion (viz. Wasson 1968; Crowley 2019; Brown and Brown 2016). However, what this school lacks in methodological precision, it makes up for in sheer originality. Exemplified by Wasson himself, this community is animated by the spirit of impassioned amateurs (here it is worth recalling that the etymology of amateur relates back to the Latin word for lovers), and to its credit, it has analyzed subjects that have received almost no attention within the academy. A key example is Peter Lamborn Wilson's Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma (1999), which proposes that the Celts carried the primordial drug religion of the Indo-Aryans to Ireland in the late Bronze Age, thereby placing Druidry alongside the Indian, Iranian, Mesoamerican, and Greek permutations of the soma cults of prehistory. George Andrews's anthology Drugs and Magic ([1975] 1997) and Frederick Dannaway's (2009, 2010) articles on the roots of Renaissance magic likewise strike out into uncharted territory in the study of esotericism. Marshaling an impressive array of primary sources, these authors claim that the psychedelic alteration of consciousness represents the secret teachings of mystery schools across the East and West; yet their work is stymied by the fact that their research is driven by a conclusion, instead of an unbiased appraisal of the evidence.

One noticeable feature of this school is that its core proponents copublish alongside each other in anthologies that extrapolate ever greater claims based on the hard entheogenic thesis. This custom began with The Road to Eleusis, continued with Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (Wasson et al. 1986), Mushrooms, Myth, and Mithras (Ruck, Hoffman, and González Celdrán 2011), and The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist (Ruck, Staples, and Heinrich 2001). Whereas scholarly communities are typically characterized by disagreement, this intellectual paradigm is unified in proposing a new way to understand who we are as humans, and the historical conditions that led us to become the way we are. Human cognition, they argue, resulted from fly agaric use among our hominid ancestors, and moving forward in time, the cave paintings of the Paleolithic era, tool making of the Neolithic, and the earliest Sumerian myths are all cyphers for humanity's burgeoning religious imagination, catalyzed by psychoactive fungi. In subsequent books, this thesis is projected into radically different religious traditions, which they “expose” as exoteric vehicles for the secret use of drugs.

Browse any shelf with entheogenic texts, and it will become instantly clear that the authors of this school consistently use the terms secret and mystery in the titles of their books. A small sample includes Wasson, Hoffmann, and Ruck's ([1978] 2008) Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, Michael Crowley's (2019) Secret Drugs of Buddhism, Jerry Brown and Julie Brown's (2016) Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, P. D. Newman's (2017) Alchemically Stoned: The Psychedelic Secret of Freemasonry, and Brian Muraresku's (2020) Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. This is not simply a marketing gimmick but points to another problem shared by members of this school. Entheogenic researchers are determined to prove that the world's religions were based on the higher truths first conveyed by the ancient cult of soma; however, to do so, they must account for the fact that drugs are no longer a major component in these traditions. The primary strategy that they use to solve this problem is, essentially, conspiracy thinking. The secret at the heart of every religion is too powerful and thereby poses too serious a threat to the established religious order. As such, entheogenic gnosis has been driven underground by a historical conspiracy between the priestly class, eager to monopolize access to higher knowledge, and civil authority, distrustful of any substance that would enlighten the populace (Znamenski 2007: 135, 142, 144). As such, the psychedelically illuminated were forced to use coded language to preserve their secret (Wilson 1999: 15). How else to explain the disparity between the ubiquity of psychedelic ceremonialism in the ancient world and its paucity in today's religions? The palpable sense of excitement and adventure that animates this intellectual subculture can be traced to the thrill of decoding, once and for all, secrets hidden by the ancients, and thereby overcoming the conspiracy against humanity's birthright.

In this alternative history, religion is construed as a monolithic entity uniformly compelled to oppress humanity's instincts to seek gnosis, whereas the psychedelic ceremonialists of the ancient past are depicted as practitioners of a variegated and authentic form of spirituality that offers salvific wisdom. Clearly, the juxtaposition between religion (construed as an oppressive force) and spirituality (construed as a positive social force) is a projection of contemporary norms that ultimately distorts how evidence is interpreted. The scholar of drugs Mike Jay (1999: 120) has diagnosed the esoteric hermeneutics of the entheogenicists’ conspiracy thinking, stating, “The alternative history explains this loss in terms of, effectively, a dualistic struggle between good and evil.”

This logic is also at work in Allegro's (1970) Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, though it pursues a different agenda. Famed for his translation work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Allegro committed what has been termed “academic suicide” by arguing that the Gospel accounts about Jesus were coded references to magic mushrooms, and that Christianity originated as an orgiastic drug cult based on the ritual use of Amanita muscaria, a custom that he traces back through Judaism to the fertility cults of the Near East during the Neolithic period. Allegro's book was based on a deep understanding of Aramaic, Hebrew, Accadian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Sumerian, and since so few people possess the requisite understanding of comparative linguistics in the ancient world, his arguments were never directly refuted. However, that did not prevent an intensive and sustained backlash, in which the book was shunned by the academy, denounced by the Church of England, and ridiculed in the international press. Considering his professional ruination, and the fact that his research shares many of the characteristics of the entheogenic paradigm, Allegro may appear to be a fellow traveler alongside Wasson and company. Yet this would be a mistake. Allegro's (1970: xxi) book was more in line with the pharmacological Calvinist agenda, insofar as he argued that fly agaric mushrooms did not inspire authentic religious revelations, but only delusions, hallucinations, and, ultimately, “drug-induced madness.” As an atheist, Allegro (1971: 182) argued that Jesus was a mushroom in order to delegitimize Christianity, not to glorify the fly agaric mushrooms. Accordingly, Allegro's work represents a fascinating combination of both pharmacological Calvinism and entheogenicism, demonstrating the shortcomings of both schools.

While thus far I have focused on the limitations of the entheogenic school, it is important to identify its value for scholarship. Earlier, I mentioned that scholars have generally ignored Wasson's entheogenic theories; however, the anthropologists Peter Furst and Weston La Barre represent significant exceptions. As historian Andrei Znamenski (2007: 121–64) has shown, the popular conception of the shaman as a master of psychoactive flora can be traced to Furst and La Barre, who utilized Wasson's entheogenic thesis to form the basis of a new subdiscipline, “psychedelic anthropology.” This rebellious subdiscipline challenged the consensus view among anthropologists who either ignored or outright disparaged indigenous use of psychoactive plants, cacti, and mushrooms as primitive or degenerate behavior. La Barre and Furst emphasized the viewpoints of tribal societies against mainstream anthropology's pharmacological Calvinism and were thus led, for example, to reject the misclassification of peyote as a dangerous narcotic and instead identified it as a sacred medicine, in accordance with Native American traditions. Furst (1976: 3–18) and La Barre (1972: 261–69) went further still by valorizing the indigenous use of psychoactive plants, arguing that it represented the last vestige of humanity's oldest religious practice, namely, the drug-based shamanism of the Upper Paleolithic. Their entheogenic challenge to mainstream anthropology inspired a handful other noteworthy anthropologists to follow their lead, including Carlos Castaneda (1968), author of the immensely popular The Teachings of Don Juan, along with its many sequels, and Michael Harner, who stretched the entheogenic understanding of shamanism beyond tribal societies to include, for example, medieval witchcraft. Marlene Dobkin de Rios extended this process of “shamanization” into Mesoamerican archaeology, reinterpreting ancient Mayan priests as shamanic masters of psychoactive flora (Znamenski 2007: 137–48). While this subdiscipline may have lost some of its vitality, the explosion of interest around psychedelic shamanism, especially in the Peruvian Amazon, and its New Age counterpart, neo-shamanism, demonstrates the continued appeal of entheogenic narratives.

Entheogenic theorizing has revitalized scholarly debates researchers were either too intellectually timid to propose or too politically intimidated, owing to drug war propaganda. The amateurs boldly go where no scholar has gone before, both intellectually and experientially. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck ([1978] 2008: 34) repudiated “armchair” scholarship and instead defied legal prohibitions and scholarly decorum by experimenting with Amanita muscaria themselves as a means of testing their hypotheses. They even went so far as demanding their detractors do the same before passing judgment on their arguments. It is also worth pointing out that the entheogenic school is guided by the desire to shape public discourse, instead of simply contributing to obscure academic debates. Though scholars tend to dismiss “popular texts” such as Muraresku's Immortality Key (2020), his work has shifted public consciousness in ways unrivaled by any recent academic study. Furthermore, this school has pointed the way to a post–drug war historiography, looking beyond the knee-jerk presumption that drugs are deleterious agents in the human story. While the exact details are up for debate, the arguments of this school are unquestionably significant, having left a lasting impact on the final school of interpretation, the empirical approach.

Before moving on, I must problematize the term entheogens. Entheogens refers to drugs used in authentic religious settings. The authors are totally out of their depth when defining what counts as authentic religion for the very plain reason that no such distinction can be made. We must ask: Authentic compared to what? Any response betrays a normative view of what religion should be, instead of what it is. The entheogenic dismissal of the psychedelicists’ drug use as hedonism was based on their own personal aesthetics and moral sensibilities, and not any scientific criteria. More to the point, their elitist rejection of bygone psychedelicist prophets and churches is frankly inaccurate, as the so-called hippies generated dozens of religions, furnished with many of the behaviors, rituals, and institutional structures commonly associated with older and presumably more venerable religion (Greer 2019). All this undermines the initial warrant for coining the term entheogen and, as a result, its ultimate utility. Finally, it bears mentioning that the entheogenic school is built on the same perennialist reading of psychedelics laid out in The Doors of Perception, which went on to inform Leary's research at Harvard, the original psychedelic guidebooks he coauthored with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass), and ultimately the movement of psychedelicist fellowships that have flourished up through the present. Therefore, despite its disavowals, entheogenic scholarship represents its own strain of psychedelicism.

Empirical Historicism

The impulse to alter consciousness may be hardwired into the human brain. It represents the “fourth drive” behind the instinct to eat, drink, and have sex, as the American psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel (1989) argued in his landmark monograph, Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances. To quote Siegel directly, “We must recognize that intoxicants are medicines, treatments for the human condition” (xi), suggesting drug taking is an evolutionary adaptive behavior for coping with the emotional and physical hardships of life. The impulse toward intoxication is likewise evident across the animal kingdom, which has led Siegel to speculate that humans learned about plant-based intoxicants from observing the behavior of animals. Though Siegel's book made the most persuasive case for the naturalization of drug use, he was not the first to make this argument. As other scholars have noted, Andrew Weil proposed a similar thesis in his popular nonfiction book The Natural Mind (1972), which made an important distinction that Seigel missed: humans are predisposed to seek out the alteration of consciousness by any means available, including—but not limited to—intoxicants. Other techniques for the alteration of consciousness, including meditation, fasting, and drumming, have also played a role in the development of human culture, and religion in particular. The question remains: How important were these techniques as compared to psychedelic drugs? It is here that the empirical approach distinguishes itself from the two competing approaches surveyed above.

Whereas pharmacological Calvinists reduce psychedelic drugs to narcotics, and entheogenic scholars essentialize them as doorways to mystical consciousness, the empiricists are guided by a nondeterministic view of how psychedelics alter consciousness. In keeping with a social constructivist position, the effects of psychedelic substances are understood as mutable, reflecting individual temperament, context, the social matrix of the user, and dose. Rejecting top-down approaches, the empirical view neither presumes that the same drug generates the same alterations of consciousness across time, space, and culture, nor assumes that all psychedelic drugs alter consciousness in the same way. Before moving onto case studies for an empirical historiography, I would like to anticipate a potential objection. Doesn't this non-reductionist approach mirror the pharmacological Calvinist's disregard for the individual characteristics of drugs, viewing them all as narcotics? This objection misses two fundamental features of the empirical approach. First, the term narcotics, derived from the Greek narkōtikos or “make numb,” is not a value-neutral classification but refers to a specific class of psychoactives traditionally used to relieve pain, including opiates, opioids, and heroin. While all narcotics are drugs, not all drugs are narcotics. But there is another, even more important consideration at play in the empirical approach, which I term Ido's Paradox. Named after the socio-historian of psychedelics Ido Hartogsohn (2020: 1), the paradox balances the fact that, as he explains it, “the character and content of a psychedelic experience . . . is not solely, or even predominantly, determined by the drug itself.” He continues, “It is instead primarily dictated by personality, expectation, and intention (set), and the physical environment in which the experience takes place, including the people in the immediate vicinity and the broader sociocultural context (setting).” Despite the social construction of psychedelic experience, a psychedelic compound like LSD does occasion a recognizably consistent multiplicity of somatic and cognitive effects.

When describing this paradox to my students, I invite them to imagine that they are clinical researchers studying the effects of ten people taking 250 micrograms of LSD. Through interviews and questionaries, these junior empiricists would confront ten different participant reports. However, for all the multiplicities recorded, these ten accounts could easily be distinguished from accounts of a similar study in which volunteers ingested caffeine pills and not LSD. The paradox consists of the fact that people report a heterogeneous variety of extreme experiences subsequent to taking LSD; yet, there is a discernable consistency in this variety compared to experiences associated with ingesting caffeine, or any other drug. Transgressing the boundaries of a purely constructivist view is precisely what defines the empirical historiography of psychedelics, as such transgressions form the basis of its bottom-up approach. Considering that each psychedelic compound occasions affective multiplicities leads scholars away from an essentialized view of the psychedelic experience in favor of the much broader category of psychedelic experiences.

Empiricists begin their analysis with context-specific case studies, examining how meanings are ascribed to psychedelic substances, and the way this ascription reflects human cognition, as it is itself embedded in larger, ongoing cultural processes, thereby working from the bottom-up, so to speak. This approach likewise reserves judgment concerning the value of psychedelic use, neither rejecting it as a social ill nor hailing it as a salvific force. As the previous section made clear, psychedelics are given singular value in the entheogenic school, which inspired a reviewer of Persephone's Quest to vent that such a fixation on drugs “degrades the human mind and spirit, which are perfectly capable of apprehending a higher reality by means other than mushrooms” (Weil 1988: 489). This truism also informs the empirical approach, which refuses to view the historical significance of psychedelics as exceptional as compared to other drugs (including opium, alcohol, tobacco, etc.) or techniques for consciousness alteration.

Humans are driven to alter their consciousness, and they have ascribed every sort of meaning to their ecstatic journeys—regardless of the use of psychedelic substances. Such a naturalization of drug use is the cornerstone of Antonio Escohotado's Historia general de las drogas (1983), a three-volume global history which has yet to be translated from Spanish, though English-language readers were offered a condensed version of his research in A Brief History of Drugs: From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age (1999). Escohotado's summary of humanity's relationship with drugs moves from the spiked wine of the ancient mysteries cults to the privileged role of opium, hashish, and coffee within medieval Islam, to the modern West's love affair with distilled spirits, and, finally, the war on drugs’ role in flooding the streets with heroin during the 1970s and the “crack-cocaine boom” of the 1980s. He does not extol psychedelic drugs as inherently spiritual, nor vilify alcohol, tobacco, or heroin as deleterious. Instead of offering deterministic accounts of how certain drugs shaped history, Escohotado's work interprets human history as the product of the dialectical antagonism between the shifting patterns of culturally sanctioned drugs and the prohibition of illicit forms of consciousness alteration. This author grounds his historiography in the association between drugs (phármakon) and the scapegoat (pharmakós) in ancient Greece, emphasizing how new social orders emerge out of the dialectic between the villainization and acceptance of established patterns of drug use.

While Escohotado's work represents one of the few empirical accounts that tackle the global history of drugs, the empirical approach has been applied in a number of context-specific studies, as exemplified by Edward Bever's Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition, and Everyday Life (2008). Scholars have long debated whether witches in premodern Europe used tropane alkaloid salves as a means of embarking on their famous “night flights” to their dark sabbaths (Ostling 2016). Bever challenges the scholarly consensus that has denied the connection between drugs and witchcraft by grounding his intervention in a close reading of archival sources, namely, the judicial records of Württemberg, Germany, between 1565 and 1701. He cites ample evidence indicating early modern regional knowledge of psychoactive drugs (including nightshade, henbane, mandrake, and datura), as well as the readiness of cunning women to use them to intentionally alter consciousness (Bever 2008: 93–150). Typifying this perspective, his work moves outward from primary source research to an engagement with the secondary literature. Moreover, Bever's text does not focus on drugs as the “secret key” or “hidden sacrament” of witchcraft; rather, psychoactives are analyzed as one part of the cultural configuration of premodern Germany within a single city, during a limited time frame.

It must be noted that empiricism is an evidence-based approach and does not presuppose a discrete methodology. Empirical approaches can come into direct conflict, as in the discussion concerning the role of altered states of consciousness (henceforth ASC) in the birth of cave art in the Upper Paleolithic. While both sides of this debate recognize ASC as a factor in the initial appearance of symbolic culture, much of the disagreement hinges on whether psilocybin mushrooms played a functional role in the development of human cognition and, by extension, if such mushrooms existed in Africa and Europe during prehistoric times. Until around 2006, the consensus among archeologists followed the arguments of neuropsychologist Patricia Helvenston and archeologist Paul Bahn, who regarded the lack of fossilized psilocybin as discrediting the association between ASC and cave art (Helvenston 2015: 84–89). On the other hand, cognitive scientist Tom Froese and his colleagues noted that prehistoric psilocybin fossils have not been located anywhere on Earth; yet they cite the recent discovery of another genera of fungi containing psilocybin (P. hispanica) in the Pyrenees mountains (and nearby cave mural depicting mushrooms) as solid evidence for the connection (Froese 2015: 96; Froese, Guzmán, and Dávalos 2016: 105). Both sides defer to empirical evidence, yet neither can claim to possess a definitive answer. At the heart of their polemical exchanges is a single question: Who bears the burden of proof? Helvenston insisted that her “drug-obsessed” interlocutors had no justification for assuming psilocybin is indigenous to Africa and Europe, nor in projecting modern drug use on humanity's earliest visual artists. Froese, convinced by the seeming omnipresence of drug use across time and space, placed the burden of proof on anyone claiming consciousness-expanding plants and fungi did not play a role in prehistory. Ultimately, though, it seems premature for either side to bear the burden of proof. A far more productive avenue for discussion asks why scholars, and the public at large, want to believe that history balances on a “secret” history of psychedelic use.

In this case, it is instructive to examine how the burden of proof discourse masked the authors’ deeper convictions, which eventually rose to the surface as the Helvenston and Froese debate turned polemical. Helvenston (2015: 109) tipped her hand as a pharmacological Calvinist in one of her most heated rebuttals, remarking, “I wasn't sure whether or not to take it seriously,” on first encountering the proposal that prehistoric humanity used psilocybin. Why would a scholar not take such a provocative argument seriously, unless they harbored prejudicial views of psychedelics? Such seems to be the case, as demonstrated in her inaccurate belief that psilocybin is toxic and causes brain damage, and that “many psychedelic substances are very harmful as they are consumed by people who are addicted to their use in these contemporary times” (104–5). She made her belief that psychedelics are a social evil all but evident when chastising Froese, stating, “In my view it is extremely irresponsible to openly advocate for their [psychedelic substances] usage and legislation” (107). Similarly, an entheogenic bias can be discerned in Froese's consistent reference to Stone Age “shamans.” His shamanization of the Stone Age is a clear appropriation of Furst and La Barre's psychedelic anthropology. More significantly, his argument that psilocybin kickstarted the cognitive revolution simply reproduced the evolutionary schema advocated by leading psychedelicists, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence McKenna, who identified psychedelics as the mechanism for humanity's next evolutionary step from Homo sapiens to Homo deus. Froese's argument simply transposed this evolutionary schema back in time, as an explanation for the cognitive revolution whereby sapiens jumped to Homo sapiens.

There is one final point that defines the empirical study of psychedelics. The empirical approach can also be used to debunk entheogenic claims, though in a manner that remains open to the historical significance of psychedelics. This is exemplified in the recent scholarship surrounding the question of soma, described above. Recall that the entheogenic school has a special interest in identifying soma as fly agaric, as it frames the ceremonial use of this archaic drug as the first global religious movement. The empirical view takes a different approach, best illustrated in the work of James McHugh (2021), who decenters the identity of soma to instead focus on how the “soma mystery” itself is a mirror for the biases and shifting opinions shaping research agendas. In his words, “If the soma mystery is never solved, that will be no bad thing, since it's so productive of interesting research in every generation, and serves as an excellent foil for changes in the theories about drug-induced religious experience” (289). This approach offers a productive means of both weighing the attempts to identify soma with a particular substance (hundreds have been suggested) while also underscoring how soma's preparation, consumption, and effects (as described in ancient Indian scriptures) defy contemporary drug taxonomies (viz. narcotic, psychedelic, euphoriant, etc.). (For a detailed bibliography, see Clark 2017: 61–63.) Building from the belief that the cosmic imagery depicting soma's subjective effects is complex enough to accommodate almost any drug, McHugh invites scholars to regard the “soma mystery” as a case study for the wider attempts to reverse engineer the identification of a drug from descriptions in ancient texts. Let there be no doubt, mysterious drug rituals are an important part of the human story; however, serious problems abound when scholars attempt to use reverse engineering to identify which drugs were used when, and by who.

Conclusion

As my encounter with the mushroom evangelists in Dolores Park shows, substances like psilocybin continue to be perceived as healing, sacred, and, of course, profitable. What the empirical approach underscores is the simple fact that psychedelic drugs have shaped the human story for better, for worse, and every way in between. By refusing to dwell in the extremes favored by pharmacological Calvinism and the entheogenic school, it also advocates full study of the spectrum of human experience and the global embrace of technologies that allow the exploration of what it means to be alive. Beyond its value to the humanities, this approach also offers a much-needed corrective to the scientific logic of today's psychedelic renaissance.

The psychedelic renaissance is haunted by the specter of religion. The medical literature associated with this line of scientific inquiry is marked by an uncritical usage of “mystical experience,” which carries deeply dangerous cultural biases. The misuse of religious terminology has caught the attention of religious studies scholars, whose critiques focus on the diagnostic tool physicians use to measure the extent of a patient's or volunteer's “mystical experience.” At the core of the psychedelic renaissance is the theory that mystical experiences occasioned by psychedelics can generate positive mental health outcomes. This was the logic that directed the breakthrough trials with psilocybin pioneered by Roland Griffith at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, and restaged at other research centers with LSD and DMT (Kishon et al. 2024). In these studies, clinicians relied on a self-reporting diagnostic tool consisting of thirty questions, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ 30), which makes the extreme alteration of consciousness legible to scientific researchers who use the results to gauge the success of their psychedelic trials. However, these questionnaires did not fall from the sky.

Clinicians insist that the MEQ's definition of mysticism is objective, denying connection to any particular religion or metaphysical system. This is naive in the extreme. As Sharday Mosurinjohn, Leor Roseman, and Manesh Girn have made clear, the MEQ rests on the antiquated religious leanings of its creator, Walter Stace (Mosurinjohn, Roseman, and Girn 2023). Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith (2023: 788–806) complemented this line of critical inquiry by tracing the MEQ's description of a successful, or “complete mystical experience”—as calculated by the “insight that ‘all is One,’” “feelings of joy,” and a “sense of reverence”—back to the neo-Vedanta forms of perennialism that inspired Stace. Accordingly, the clinical attempt to measure an idealized mystical experience emerges from the same perennialist view underlying the entheogenic school. Both essentialize psychedelics as agents of mystical consciousness and, in keeping with the perennialist framework, regard such experiences as the common core of all religious traditions. Yet serious scholars of religion don't accept perennialism as a legitimate basis for the comparative study of religion and dismiss attempts to distinguish an ultimate reality behind all religions as crypto-theology.

The idealized view of mystical experience coded into the MEQs is out of touch with the vast index of historical data concerning ASC. There is no mention of darkness, malevolence, or terror in the MEQ; in this view, bad trips cannot be mystical. For clinicians, mysticism is totally cleaved from the archive of harrowing religious experiences, which the Catholic saint St. John of the Cross termed “the dark night of the soul.” The strenuous agony and excruciating paranoia that is commonplace in the archive of religious revelation across time and space are disqualified without justification. To be sure, mystical states are far from uniformly prosocial, healing, and pleasant. Though an empiricist may disagree with Zaehner's reductionist view of drugs, the Oxford scholar was right in identifying Charles Manson as a mystic, and his psychedelicist ideology is no less mystical on account of its disregard for human life.

Leaving aside bummer trips, the MEQ leaves no room for what is simply weird. Readers who dip into psychedelic periodicals from the past sixty-five years, or the thousands of trip reports posted on Erowid (the database for psychedelicist citizen-science), will find a profusion of narratives detailing telepathy, disembodied intelligences, trance possession, spiritual vivisections, UFO abductions, journeys into hyperspace, reincarnation, and communion with dead relatives. According to the perennialist logic of the MEQ, these experiences are merely expressions of “anxiety” and “panic reactions,” which not only marginalizes these experiences but also unduly delegitimizes their ontological reality. This is not simply an oversight, but a direct result of the perennialist logic at work within biomedical research. The fact that this is the same logic that undergirds the entheogenic school weakens the credibility of the clinical trials; moreover, it frames the psychedelic renaissance as something closer to a new religious movement than value-neutral inquiry. Alternatively, abandoning the top-down approach of the MEQ in favor of bottom-up empiricism would add considerable conceptual rigor to these trials, which would in turn expand our index and understandings of psychedelic instrumentality.

The psychedelic renaissance is, ultimately, an attempt at historical periodization. Etymologically, the word renaissance means “rebirth.” Of course, rebirth implies death. But how can something that never died be reborn? Conforming to the prohibitionist model of the drug war, the concept of a psychedelic renaissance wrongly presupposes psychedelicism ended in the 1960s. It didn't. Psychedelicist scenes only deepened and diversified as they moved across the globe in the last six decades. The “rebirth” narrative of the psychedelic renaissance redacts the last half century from the historical record, which is especially pernicious considering how this period saw the emergence of new strains of psychedelicism, led by women, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. These branches of psychedelicism specifically reconfigure the meanings and value of consciousness expansion by elevating the hardships and collective empowerment of these groups as the backdrop for universal human liberation. Admitting such psychedelicist knowledge production into clinical trials not only speaks to the need for an empirical historiography. More importantly, these discourses would interrogate the perennialist norms and procedures of clinical therapy, whereby the current medicalization of psychedelics could transform into something far more powerful: the psychedelicist decolonialization of clinical therapy.

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